Blake's Milton designs
Though Blake's splendid watercolor sequences to Milton's poems, particularly those to Paradise Lost and L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, are visually among his finest achievements as an illustrator, the view persists that iconographically they are essentially magnificent pictorial footnotes, in which Blake plays scribe to Milton's prophet. Yet the differences between the two poets both as radicals and as Christians make it seem likely that Blake would have responded to matters as momentous as the fall and redemption of man on his own terms in his pictorial commentaries. These thought-provoking essays take a fresh look at the internal dynamics of each sequence, stressing "horizontal" progressions and iconographic contrasts as well as "vertical" relationships between text and design, and showing how frequently the key to Blake's meaning depends on recognition of his (often subversive) use of traditional pathos formulae. The conclusion they work toward is that Blake is offering "strong," radically deconstructive readings, in the same impishly irreverent spirit he adopted in the Marriage and in Milton. Particularly intriguing from a feminist perspective is that in the larger Paradise Lost series he appears to be exonerating Eve
